So Peggy Noonan went to the Fainting Couch Superstore over the IRS this week and got a few new pieces. It was bad enough in her eyes that anyone would dare question the notion that Tea Party groups were perfectly non-political and deserve tax-exempt status, the real issue is that President Uppity “T-Bone” YoungBuck dared to go after rich Romney voters, because that’s the only possible explanation for this:

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.”

Won’t you help America’s most victimized class, the obnoxiously rich, fend off these heartless attacks?

All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.

If only there was somebody who could tell us, through that person’s mastery of statistical analysis, just how remote the possibility of this not being deliberate targeting was. Just so we’d know how worried to be when Obama comes to kill the opposition.

In the table below, I’ve estimated the number of taxpayers in each income group who were audited in 2012, as derived from statistics in the I.R.S.’s 2012 Data Book. It is also possible to estimate how many Mitt Romney and Barack Obama voters would have been audited last year. The calculation assumes that an individual’s chance of being audited was related to their income, but not to their political views.

I estimate the number of voters in each income bracket from the 2012 Current Population Survey. I then estimate the share of the vote in each income bracket that went to Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama based on last year’s national exit poll. (Note that the income brackets used in the exit poll and the Current Population Survey do not exactly match the income brackets listed in the I.R.S.’s audit data, so I use the closest available approximations.)

This results in an estimate that about 380,000 of Mr. Romney’s voters were audited last year, as were about 480,000 of Mr. Obama’s voters.

Well. It’s almost like the IRS audits low-income Americans far more than the wealthy because there are far more low-income Americans to audit, and they are much more likely to receive a refund from the government, and that these low-income Americans are primarily Obama voters. It’s also almost like Peggy Noonan found a couple people who had been audited and concluded, without any evidence whatsoever, that they had been deliberately targeted because of their political views, and that she then dismissed every other possible explanation for the audits.

And then Nate Silver came along and said “Wow, this woman is insane, TO THE NATE CAVE” and then squished her. Then he probably had a tasty beverage.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Zandarhttps://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgZandar2013-05-19 07:36:542013-05-19 07:36:54The Plural of "Noonan" Is Not "Data"

Outrage, no matter how unreasonable, will always beat data. Nate’s right but Noonan wins anyway.
More people will be willing to believe that the IRS is evil than will look at columns of numbers and make their own decisions.

And poor Noonan will cry all the way to the bank. Noonan and her ilk favor the cons because they’re both in the business of making shit up and then harrumphing about it. Who wants to do analysis or investigative reporting or fact checking when you can make big bucks with a quick harrumph?

So now, all you’re left with are memories of him and his hairy toes.
And those memories are rapidly fading due to alcoholic dementia – and all of that self-loathing, and unfulfilled love, manifests itself in an open hatred for Democrats, and especially that “Uppity Nigrah” in the (NO LONGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) White (people’s) House.

I hope the next time she’s choking on the olives in her 6th ‘min gartini, staken – not shirred,’ the bartender goes to take a pee, because s/he decides that administering the Heimlich maneuver again, wouldn’t be in the best interests of, “We the people.”

This has everything that leads to horrible and deliberate misinformation; complicated rules, numbers, a timeline that can be jiggered to appear malicious even when it’s not.

It is interesting that Noonan and others apparently feel they have to shift the focus from the political groups to individuals. They need a better narrative, I guess. A tactical shift. They wouldn’t be changing the story if they felt the story was resonating politically.

Anyway, good for Nate Silver for applying his skills outside election analysis. He could really add light to this.

The real issue is who will the MSM gasbags use as a basis for reporting to the wider public?

Noonan, with her heart wrenching story of an honest “Job Creator” being targeted by Obama for supporting Romney or Silver, with all his numbers and stuff ’cause math is hard, which is why I went to J-school?

My bet is on Noonan-esque stories, no matter how wrong or misrepresentation they are.

Good God. Noonan’s column is a good example of why we should try to teach probability and statistics to all high schoolers, rather than leaving it until college for science, technology, engineering, and math students.

He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors.

A few more observations: Silver says that the IRS audits, on average, about 1% of the population every year. What is the probability that you could go 30 years or more without an audit? That will happen about 74% of the time.

That’s assuming no knowledge about this guy’s income, but he’s actually a millionaire, and Silver says that 12% of millionaires are audited each year. If he’s been a millionaire for 30 years, he should ask himself something different: How is it possible that he’s gotten away without being audited for so long? That will only happen 2% of the time; millionaires only have a 50% chance of going just 5 years without an audit. (So I’m guessing he’s a relatively recent millionaire.)

It always strikes me as being strange that people can accumulate enormous wealth without understanding the basics of how numbers work. I guess that’s what accountants are for.

It still amazes me how much opposition there is to Obamacare among paid conservatives and media.

An election in 2008, a lengthy public debate, it got through Congress, they took it to the Supreme Court, they’ve fought it in every state, then ANOTHER election where Obama won (and they chose his name to attach to the law, remember) and still the battle continues. This law has been validated over and over and over.

One almost has to admire that persistence and devotion to denying 40 million people access to healthcare. What is it about this thing that so terrifies them?

I’m really interested to see how this meme gains momentum. Obama targeted individuals based on speech or party affiliation. How does the IRS know of one’s party affiliation, where would it get this data? Do IRS agents go to each county and every precinct and get the voter registration rolls and then match them to the accounts? Do they monitor TV and email; maybe NSA helps with this part. How come Orly Taitz hasn’t been audited or Noonan herself?

Also, too, where was Noonan’s outrage When the IRS targeted liberals under Bush?

Thank you.

Also – I swear to God I don’t understand where the scandal is, even if it IS true that conservative groups were targeted because they were conservative. The Bush administration targeted liberal groups because they were liberal; the Carter administration targeted white supremacist groups because they were white supremacists. This happens ALL THE TIME. People were pissed every time and hey, I might concede that it’s a dick maneuver, but I’ve never really thought much about it because to me a tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right (certainly when the organization in question has the means to pay taxes).

One almost has to admire that persistence and devotion to denying 40 million people access to healthcare. What is it about this thing that so terrifies them?

Two things:
1) It reduces the colossal profits of big insurance and health care companies.
2) It will be wildly successful and popular once it’s fully implemented. Successful social welfare programs undermine the right wing’s orthodox belief and selling point that all government is bad. Obamacare is a battle that the Right has to win in order to remain credible.

I don’t know yet, I supported it so I’m watching with interest, but just as a process, you can’t get much more “validation” of a law in our system than election, debate, congressional passage, supreme court, another election.

If people had wanted to overturn Obamacare, they could have gotten rid of Obama in November. I mean, paid conservatives and media put his damn NAME on it.

“Shoved down our throats!” Nonsense. It’s been through every branch of government, the executive TWICE. At some point they have to admit THEY are opposed to this law, and the hell with “process.”

I think Nate kinda blew it here. The relevant question is, were rich Romney activists audited at a (statistically) significantly higher rate than other rich people? He doesn’t really attempt to answer that question, and the question he does answer – how many Romney supporters likely got audited – winds up requiring a good deal more analysis and numbers than the question he should have answered.

The key fact is, to quote Nate, that “about 12 percent of individuals who made more than $1 million were audited in 2012.”

So if there were 33 Romney supporters earning over $1 million a year who were publicly active on Romney’s behalf, you’d expect 4 of them to be audited, just by random chance.

To me the only validation of Obamacare that will matter is individual citizens deciding that they’re better of with it. Politicians on the right will keep telling us that it’s ebil Soshulism. When enough people see direct benefits in their lives the GOP’s and the Libertarians’ objections will fall on deaf ears.

There’s a reason for this, over-generalizing was very important to our ancestors (“I saw a bush rustling, there’s a tiger in it. I got sick last time I ate this plant, I’m never eating it again.”), but nowadays you really have to be able to override it.

If he’s been a millionaire for 30 years, he should ask himself something different: How is it possible that he’s gotten away without being audited for so long?

You seem to be presuming randomness in selection for audits. I am not suggesting political motivation, but there are types of income generation, types of deductions, ratios of deductions to income, etc., that vastly increase one’s chances of being audited. I would guess that there are some people who are audited almost every year and some who can go 30 years without ever hearing a peep from the IRS.

Joy Reid got me to consider the hypothesis that Tom Coburn leaked the fake Benghazi emails to Jon Karl. I like the circumstantial stuff she brings up fine, but Coburn to my mind doesn’t have the motivation to shiv Obama like this.

But my CT goes like this: Coburn doesn’t attend the Senate Intel Committee briefing that includes the emails. They aren’t allowed to take the actual emails out of the room, but they can make notes. So Coburn gets the notes from someone else. He thinks he’s dealing with actual quotes, and so when he leaks them to Karl, Karl himself thinks he’s dealing with the actual quotes and Tom Coburn as a source to back that up. And now everybody’s got egg on their face.

In other words, the whole gotdam thing is a clusterfuck from the word go. The Republican base had their chance to demonize Obama/Hillary, and now the Democratic base is getting their chance to demonize an anonymous GOP source and a percieved GOP media shill. Karl can’t burn Coburn because he gave the quotes up in good faith (to Karl). Coburn won’t give up whoever he got the notes from because it was his stinking thinking that mistook a partisan take on the email for the actual email itself. Meanwhile, UMBRELLA.

Our Congress hard at work for the American people, ladies and gentlemen.

You seem to be presuming randomness in selection for audits. I am not suggesting political motivation, but there are types of income generation, types of deductions, ratios of deductions to income, etc., that vastly increase one’s chances of being audited.

Years ago, I worked at the IRS, and learned that every return is given a score that roughly reflects the possibility of its being fraudulent. Claiming a deduction for in-home office expense? Writing off gambling losses? Classifying as a business an activity that consistently loses money and might be considered a hobby? All of those will cause your score to go up. But if the only income you report is W-2 earnings and you only claim the standard deduction and don’t use a Schedule A, your score will be very low.

The IRS then audits escalating percentages of returns within ranges of scores. (IRS computers will also compare income statements from payers against what taxpayers report on their returns and generate letters of inquiry when payments are not found, and these, too, are considered “audits,” although they don’t involve a thorough examination of the return.) And although I understand the process was modified under the Bush administration to shift the auditing process more to lower-income strata and that cutbacks in IRS staffing have reduced the chances of an audit across the board, I believe the process is still roughly the same.

Taxpayers in higher income brackets use more of the sorts of tax-avoidance devices that raise the scores of their returns than do taxpayers in lower income brackets. So although Nate Silver’s analysis isn’t exactly on the mark, it’s probably the best approximation possible using the data. Not that Nooners would understand any of that, but then, I doubt she does anything more with her taxes than sign the return an accountant has prepared.

Nate Silver’s report is a red herring, Neither Noonan nor anyone else has talked about IRS discrimination to voters, that’s over half of all adult Americans. The concern was unwanted auditor attention to the donors of tea party groups. The bookish IRS auditors are as likely to be closet Republicans as closet Democrats, even more so, common sense tells you that.

The real scandal is that as the Treasury’s Inspector General for tax administration report reveals, the rogué auditors overzealously required detailed lists of individual donors to those tea party affiliated groups applying to the tax exempt staus. The IRS also asked “unnecessary, burdensome” questions about donors and other sensitive information that, in some cases, the agency never needed or ended up using. The Teasury Inspector General blames this on “a lack of managerial review, at all levels, of questions before they were sent to organizations seeking tax-exempt status.”

@Baud: Also, when you file a new kind of return–like going from a married to a not married state, or having kids, or changing jobs, or moving across country, or filing for TAX EXEMPT STATUS you might reasonbly be expected to trigger some kind of flag and get audited because you are, you know, doing something different and changing your filing.

@Kay: kay, we’ve already seen them take food out the mouths of poor kids, what makes you think that grandma and grandpa have a chance with these assclowns. They’re ideological locusts, if they can take it, they will and these political sociopaths will sleep soundly knowing that by killing your grandparents that they prevented one T-Bone from being obtained all is right in their world.

I don’t know about that, though, because the people who will most benefit from Obamacare are the people we don’t hear from. I don’t know that the numbers work. It’s 40 million mostly ignored people. It’s also gradual for those who are IN the system, so if there are benefits accruing, it won’t be “Obamacare IN = benefits for me!”
It isn’t really a politically convenient law :)
It’s difficult to sell and easy to attack, and part of that has to do with that fact that the groups who already get healthcare are the only people we ever hear from.

Looking at the bobblehead lineup I see Nooners is on Dancing Dave’s show alongside Bob ” Benghazi Reminds Me of Watergate” Woodward. On the plus side, former POW and perpetual Senator John McCain is nowhere to be found.

@Kay: But Kay, the basic thing to realize about the opposition is that they don’t believe facts that make them uncomfortable. Look at any bumpkin thread under one of the periodic shootings of small children by other kids or by family members. A very high proportion of the comments will run the gamut from “this didn’t really happen” to “it happened but its not statistically signficant” to “they weren’t what I call responsible gun owners.”

40 million people seems like a lot to you because you a) believe in their existence, b) can imagine their suffering, c) don’t really care to excavate their entire family history to find the reason they deserved to be without health care. Right there you can see the difference between you and the kind of people who are choosing to fight Obamacare. They simply don’t believe there was a problem, they don’t grasp the size and significance of the number 40 million, they think the true stories they hear are mere propaganda and in direct opposition to Balzac they don’t believe that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” they think that behind every working poor person/minority person/single mother lies a great crime. They want to see those people suffer for their evil actions and they consider health care, a living wage, free public education and a lack of fear some kind of unfair reward for shiftlessness.

@Tokyokie: The IRS scoring system (the concept, anyway) was explained on the front page of the Seattle Times this year. The actual scoring values are still closely held. There are also various trades (construction, entertainment) that the IRS has found to be more likely to break rules and that affects their score.

Digby had a post up yesterday: the National Organization for Marriage was complaining that a conservative writer had been audited – NOM thought it was clearly political. But in the body of the piece, their writer explains that she was audited for expenses that she took for writing. My wife does some small editing/writing jobs for non-profits. She doesn’t travel to meet her clients and frankly, there’s no expenses to deduct. If NOM’s writer was trying to claim a home office and the cost of a computer and smart phone (which she uses predominantly for other things), then yes, the IRS’s scoring will flag her for a possible audit.

@aimai:
Add to that: A very large number of them are seeing their way of life disappear. Morals they believe were almost universal a generation ago are now in the minority. We detest these ‘morals’ – homophobia, compulsory religion, racism, anti-intellectualism – and they were never as universal as these people think. Still, their way of life IS dying, and the last couple of elections have made that abundantly plain. They’re panicking and lashing out with all their strength at every sign that the Other is taking over. And you know, they’re right. The Other IS taking over. Tolerant multiculturalism has been growing steadily for the last half century.

When enough people see direct benefits in their lives the GOP’s and the Libertarians’ objections will fall on deaf ears.

The GOP won’t be objecting to it, when it is popular.

They will be taking credit for it, because Obamacare was originally their idea per (1) the 1993 Heritage Foundation proposal and (2) the Massachusetts healthcare plan that Republican governor Mitt Romney ushered in.

The MSM will dutifully pass the Republicans significant role in creating Obamacare onto the public, as well as remind everyone that without these Republican ideas we’d never have gotten Obamacare off the ground.

Gee, Peggy, I thought that trying to kill the opposition party dead was the GOP’s explicit goal for the last decade or more. Remember Karl Rove’s thing about creating a “permanent Republican majority”? Remember the rank, overt, and corrupt pay-to-play system that Tom DeLay created in Congress through the K Street Project? I was there in DC at the time this all went down. I lived it. I’ve got the scars to show for it. The GOP didn’t just want to win elections. They explicitly wanted – and still WANTS – to destroy the Democratic Party. And the GOP actually did a pretty good job of executing on that plan in the south.

This IRS thing is a GREAT opportunity to flip the narrative, and turn the GOP aggressors into victims.

The timeline is definitely not on the Dems’ side here. Obamacare may be a liability for a generation the way the CRA was (though on a smaller scale to be sure). It’s definitely a negative for the next few presidential election cycles at least. But if we can hang on until demographics and wide positive experience favor us I think it’s permanent.

Noonan has no way to know why a given taxpayer is audited. She has no way to know if a taxpayer actually is audited at all, or is just claiming to have been audited.

An audit doesn’t hurt if you have been honest with your accountant. Usually they just want to see an explanation of why your data seems inconsistent. Which is usually because they’re missing some of the data they need. Given that about half the voting population is conservative, it seems likely that half the people who were audited may have been conservative.

@RSA: To be even more concrete: On average, the garden-variety millionaire will be audited between 3 and 4 times over a period of 30 years. (A binomial distribution with n = 30 and p = .12 has an expected (mean, or average) value of n x p or .12 x 30 = 3.6.)

@Kay: You’ve said – beautifully – everything I’ve been asking for years. The height – so far, at least – of selfishness was the reaction of Jean Schmidt to the news – mistaken – that the healthcare law had been struck down by the Supreme Court.

The amount of pure joy that woman and her supporters expressed that millions of people would be denied health care was the single most vile moment in public life I’ve ever seen. And I’m 62!

@Ken:
That’s what I was thinking. Those Romney yard signs spoke to her, and they told her that what she wanted to be true WAS true. She could feel it.

The only way to defuse these people is to keep pointing and laughing. They’re amusing, like toddlers in need of a nap who are going to tip over asleep 2 minutes after the outburst. You don’t reason with them. So I say, YAY to Nate Silver for doing the arithmetic, and I also say that I’m looking forward to the hearings.

What they want is to puff themselves up and hint darkly at the president (see what I did there?) about Nixonian tactics. What they’re gonna get is some office shlubs talking about the new laws that meant quadrupling their workload overnight.

Maybe we’ll even get to hear about the laws themselves, eh? That would be good. I think for most of the USA the phrase “Citizens United” has exactly the inverse echo of “Benghazi.” It’s something the political types care about, for reasons too weird to waste time on. If people pay attention to hearings about the IRS, they ought to find out the truth — that every ridiculous Tea Party organization thinks of itself like a little church. Does the public want there to be tax exemptions or not? I’m guessing they do. Does the public want everybody who asks for a tax exemption to get it? I don’t think so.

Who do I complain to about being targeted by the IRS? They actually audited my 2010 tax returns because: 1) late filling; 2) went from meager earnings to making more money (thanks grandpa). Also, too, I let my cousin file my taxes. But I like to believe that I was targeted because I am a BJ commentor and I associate with the likes of SF and CS and other disputable characters.

@gene108: Follow the money. One of the prime things that the GOP did was to try and dry up the Democrat’s source of campaign funding – and starve them of their ability to counter the GOP’s barrage of media attacks (both advertising and the freebies handed out by right wing talk radio and Fox news). The GOP let corporations and large donors know … in no uncertain terms … that is was not safe for them to split their contributions between parties, and that contributions to the Democrats were watched.

The Democrats faced difficult headwinds in the south because of culture war politics anyway. But being starved for funds put them on the defensive … and the GOP has rolled right over them.

It is not the mandate that upsets Republicans. The individual mandate is the part of healthcare reform that Republicans like. They hate the medical loss ratio which requires insurance companies to spend 80-85% on actual health care. And there are regulations about what constitutes actual health care now.

The other thing that they absolutely hate is the thing that they know is coming because Sebelius convened a committee in 2009 to start planning it and the President referred to it in one sentence in his SoTU speech. The Medicare reimbursement system is about to change dramatically. Instead of reimbursing in a fee for service model, reimbursements will be based on a best practice treatment plan per condition. Mayo Clinic spends less per patient but has better outcomes –doesn’t run every test possible which brings more money to the hospitals but doesn’t necessarily lead to better treatment or outcomes. So now Medicare will expect hospitals to follow these best practices and eliminate a lot of unnecessary expense.

I was at this Preparing for Retirement thing the other night, and the speaker was talking about rising health care costs. She asked the audience to guess the reasons and the first guess was from one of the many Angry Old White Guys present: Obamacare.

The speaker said her numbers were from before Obamacare (to which I say, why?) and her answer was prescription drugs and long term care.

I wanted to say Obamacare was already bending the curve on rising costs, but no way was I jumping into that nasty arena.

@IowaOldLady: Also too, it was their idea back when they were at all interested in solving problems (remember when Republicans actually put at least minimal effort into governing? *wistful sigh*). Now they hate Obamacare for many/all of the reasons cited upthread but mostly because it will solve problems for large numbers of average American citizens. They hate that. We’ve reached the point where Republicans don’t want to solve problems for average Americans, even if the solution is their own idea, because they just can’t maintain their tenuous grasp on power if people’s suffering decreases.

@IowaOldLady:
One of the more cynical aspects of all of the Obamacare fear mongering is that Republicans were knowingly using the individual mandate that was their idea to drum up the outrage. If they went around saying insurance companies will have to spend your premiums on actual health care and not on salaries and lobbying what would the response have been? But the firebaggers also left out the Medial Loss Ratio because that would not have fit in with their fear mongering about ObamaCare being a big handout to corporations. And then they teamed up with the far right in opposition. Things that make you go hmmmm.

Interestingly one of the problems with Romneycare in Mass is that it didn’t have the Medical Loss Ratio and so cost containment was not one of its strong points.

@Ultraviolet Thunder: You took the words out of my mouth (and, no doubt, improved them)… I read the posting and noted Noonan’s evidence of, well, essentially hysteria. Silver presents evidence — statisical anaysis. But the right-wing rage machine won’t hear/ponder such information. All they know is that they have been wronged and heads must roll! Rinse and repeat ad nauseum.

I just watched ABC’s Clown Revue, and while there was plenty of time to talk about the AP and the IRS, there was not a single peep about the doctored Benghazi emails. I’d have thought at minimum there would be a retraction or maybe an apology for abusing the press’s promise to seek the truth. But there was nothing.

Re Chances of being audited: Back in the 1980s when I was doing a Schedule C, my accountant told me not to claim the whole of Con Ed or phone charges. He said that amount would look out of proportion to what I was said I was making as a freelance typist. Yes, the home office thing was tricky to do. So we figured out a percentage to use that covered some of the expenses. It was a good strategy.

@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Yes, yes, yes! There is a great living to be had in harrumphing, obfuscating, and mis-informing!

Here’s something I wonder about though… After about five years now of having to witness the shit storm of lies and insults that conservatives have thrown at our president, are we more — or less — likely to give a conservative voice a chance if we’re stupid enough to elect one president in ’16? The day AFTER Obama was elected, I began seeing idiots posting comments on the web such as “Worst president ever!” I cannot begin to express my own level of resentment and indignation over such idiocy. I don’t know that I would be able anymore to maintain perspective and be unemotional over a Republican presidential misstep in the future. Am I alone on this?

Here’s what I wonder: what becomes of our body politic if we all absolutely detest “the other side”? Now, of course, if we DO have a Republican president again in the future and a Democratic-led Congress, no doubt our elected Democratic officials will roll over and allow the Repub to steamroll his agenda through Congress. That’s the way it seems to work.

I find myself wanting to move to the gated community of Blueburbia, where people value education and the environment, where you can suggest that we all share a societal duty to help raise each other’s children and not be labeled a communist. I will glower across the wide and raging river at my neighbors to the south, The Confederacy of Redstatia and wonder what the hell happened to this country.

@Kay:What is it about this thing [Obamacare] that so terrifies them?
Long term, it will completely sever your health care from your employer.

Should ACA get implemented in full (still precarious— we’re just one President Christie away from full repeal, with nothing to replace), “the poors” will no longer be a sub-healthy undercaste, slaves in all but name. And those in the middle classes, no longer in total thrall to their employers, will be much more likely to start their own businesses.

Noonan’s clientele despises anything that would bring so much economic freedom, to so many.

@ppcli: I’d seen the Whiskey Fire story on a link from Charlie Pierce , and yep, it’s Rule #1: Don’t let the client talk to the agent.

The scary part is that the Blazer loons are 100:1 against the obvious fact that it was a routine Scheule C audit. That a woman writing supposed economic articles could be as clueless as 10 Megans – ouch.

@RSA: It always strikes me as being strange that people can accumulate enormous wealth without understanding the basics of how numbers work. I guess that’s what accountants are for.

I just got finished watching the Jason Statham movie, Safe. The little girl who is pivotal to the plot keeps getting asked if she understands “business.” Which seems to consist of people getting bribed and then shot. A lot.

I believe that is the sense of business operational with a lot of these ruthless people with a lot of money. What makes a gangster is the head shot when things get frustrating. Right up to that point… you are a “business person.”

OT.. The President is going to address the graduation class of Morehouse College shortly. One of the graduates is Genarlow Wilson who was convicted of aggravated child molestation because he had oral sex while 17 with a 15 year old. It was consensual. He was sentenced to a ten year prison term. The GA Supreme Ct. overturned his conviction after 3 years. Congratulations go to Mr. Wilson, who refused to give up.

2) It will be wildly successful and popular once it’s fully implemented. Successful social welfare programs undermine the right wing’s orthodox belief and selling point that all government is bad. Obamacare is a battle that the Right has to win in order to remain credible.

If it’s fully implemented and a success, wingnuts will claim it as their own.

Considering how polls show that most people find the Tea Party in general to be disreputable and offensive, I seriously doubt that an IRS “scandal” is going to have much traction with most folks. At least, I hope so though I know that relying on rational thought happening with my fellow citizens is how I’ve been disappointed many, many times before.

Their continuing to harp on it makes it all the more clear to more people that Citizens United created a bullshit class of organizations that are classified as “social welfare” organizations that can NOT have politics as their primary activity, and everyone knows that the Tea Party is all about politics. They are doing an even better job of exposing this BS wink N’ nudge designation than Stephen Colbert did with his Super PAC. Keep up the good work, boys!

So Jindal, Boehner, and probably others have specifically said people should go to jail for the IRS “scandal.”

I may well be remembering incorrectly, but I don’t recall lots of democrats saying out loud that people should go to jail for the Iraq war and war crimes. And Obama has said the very opposite… out loud.

@StringOnAStick: The local newspaper surveyed all the TPers they could find to ask them about their IRS experience. No local group had a problem, and we have some loud TPers around here. One group near Pittsburgh complained, as did one in Philadelphia. One near Philadelphia ranted about all the paperwork required, dumb questions, etc., and then said she dropped the request for tax exemption because the most they’ve ever had in their treasury is $200.

Going by this, there doesn’t seem to be a big nationwide problem. I wonder how many of the audited groups also noted on their forms that they were also Sovereign Citizens or somesuch.

@Ultraviolet Thunder: I’m thinking something bigger. Unexpected celebrity death, with possibly drug overdose or murder involved. That allows the media to cover the story and also bring in “experts” to talk about addiction or whatever.

@pokeyblow: Boehner is the weakest Speaker in history. Jindal’s approval ratings have tanked after a series of political/policy failures. Both are desperate to regain approval from the wingnuts, but that sort of hyperbole makes them look foolish.

Front page story in the NYTimes today that pretty clearly shows the Cincinnati office was just mismanaged and buried under a flood of applications that came post-Citizens United. This “scandal” is looking almost as empty as Benghazi! does.

The number one trigger for an audit? The Earned Income Tax Credit. In fact, every EITC claim is automatically reviewed every year and the vast majority of people have no idea. Number two is claiming a dependent. The home office deduction is also highly scrutinised because it has a high rate of being abused as a tax shelter, but those are not as commonly claimed as EITC. As long as your ducks are in a row an audit isn’t some scary thing, but it’s when things aren’t that people squak.

Oh and this:

He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited

As usual, Republicans are spewing bullshit. They don’t care what they say — whether it’s true, false, unknown, or unknowable — as long as they think it’ll gain them political traction. Bullshit is the alpha and the omega of Republican political advocacy.

But, thanks Zandar, for noting Silver’s analysis that debunks some of the nonsense being spread around.

I guess I have to find time to read that IG report. I read that groups were targeted all across the political spectrum, and the only group that actually had its tax exemption pulled was a liberal group.

So, why all the fuss over the teabaggers? Were they the only ones subject to the notorious key word search? But, were only big reactionary political groups let off the hook, or were big Peterson ‘muddle middle’ and liberal groups let off the hook too? (edited for spelling, but I like ‘ott’ and think it should be a word)

@Anya: Why are we supposed to care about Noonan again? Skip her and keep your sanity.

And my understanding of the IRS scandal is that T’Bagger groups were the vast majority of those requesting tax exemption so of course they were the most audited. Plus, the only group to be denied tax exemption status was one on the left.

I love how the right is portraying this as some kind of invasive witch hunt.

Political groups tried t take advantage of a tax exemption intended for groups that provide “social welfare” measures. They voluntarily sent in their application for the exemption, and were stunned to see that the IRS looked at their files closely because their names seemed to suggest their primary role was not, in fact, running a soup kitchen or a donated clothing center.

Truly, this is worse than a zillion Watergates and a million Iran Contra scandals.

It always strikes me as being strange that people can accumulate enormous wealth without understanding the basics of how numbers work.

Most of them know how numbers work. They’re just bullshitting to deceive the (innumerate) general public into adopting their political views. This is, I think, Republican Propaganda Technique #87383882. Or it could be #984949938838. I gotta look it up.

@Zandar: The fact that Obama is Black is enough to generate T’Bagger turnout in 2014. I can’t see Repubs getting any mileage out of any of these “scandals” that they can’t get just because Obama is a socialist, communist, Muslim, Nazi, secularist Kenyan. Their hatred is enough.

Ain’t this the same Noonan who wrote that hilarious article before the election, predicting a Romney landslide. Her evidence? A feeling she could feel, spreading throughout the land. Things are turning, turning! Also, she’d seen a couple of Romney lawn signs.

@Hill Dweller: Hastert was weak only in the sense of waiting until Dubya said he could do something before bringing a bill to the floor. In fact I’m trying to think of an instance where Hastert initiated an action before the Dark Lord told him to jump and precisely how high. I’m drawing a blank. When it came to marshalling the troops Hastert was all over that.

And, were only teabagger groups asked about donor and membership lists. That is the aspect that bothers me the most, regarding setting precedents for future abuses. Was that done only to teabagger groups?

but I’ve never really thought much about it because to me a tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right (certainly when the organization in question has the means to pay taxes).

Sorry, but bullshit. Government violates the 1st Amendment when it uses political affiliation to decide how to dispense benefits, even benefits that are “privileges” instead of “rights”, such as, say, driver’s licenses.

@jl: it’s all because of that IRS official’s public statement about using keywords to flag applications for extra scrutiny. IMHO what the defense ought to have been was that the agency is charged with sniffing out inappropriate political activity by nominal “social welfare organizations,” and that a surge in political activity from conservatives naturally landed conservative organizations on the list for closer monitoring, the end. IOW, what happened was not “targeting of conservatives,” but targeting of political activity beyond a legally-defined threshold, much but not all of which was by conservatives because many new groups submitting applications were conservative.

@Patrick: Isn’t Peggy Noonan the pundit who claimed that Romney would the election because Noonan had seen a couple of Romney signs on a few lawns?
If so, why should I ever pay attention to her again?

I always wonder if the people who take Nooners seriously have really forgotten about the Magic Dolphins column, or if they genuinely don’t consider that do be a sign of eccentricity, if not actual madness. “We mustn’t question her faith…” There are plenty of other reasons she would be dismissed in a rational world, both the substance and the theatrical mugging of her “just walk on by” moment, for example, but if she used her WSJ real estate to make a political argument based on what the Virgin Mary or St Michael had told her in a dream, would she be on the Sunday shows as a VSP? Well, probably.

IOW, what happened was not “targeting of conservatives,” but targeting of political activity beyond a legally-defined threshold, much but not all of which was by conservatives because many new groups submitting applications were conservative

The other problem is there was zero direction from the upper echelons of management about what the exact definitions were. So when the Cincinnati office got inundated with claims they just made shit up as they went along and it blew up. What I find interesting is that TIGTA actually released the results of the investigation publicly. That’s very uncommon.

@Tonal (visible) Crow: But “political affiliation” can mean a lot of things. It might be unlawful to deny rights or benefits to Democrats or Republicans or Marxists or Communitarians, but is it unlawful to deny them to politically affiliated people tout court if there’s a law saying that political activity tout court is forbidden?

@Yatsuno: good point. Still, “tea party” and such seem to me to be entirely appropriate red-flag words for inappropriate political activity by tax-exempt groups circa 2010-13. If critics of Obama from the left had owned the name “firebaggers” and created a bunch of nominally apolitical organizations to raise money, it would also be appropriate to red-flag that. The right uses shibboleths more consistently than the left does.

@Tonal (visible) Crow: But “political affiliation” can mean a lot of things. It might be unlawful to deny rights or benefits to Democrats or Republicans or Marxists or Communitarians, but is it unlawful to deny them to politically affiliated people tout court if there’s a law saying that political activity tout court is forbidden?

That depends on context. It would violate the 1st Amendment to prohibit political activity on the public sidewalks (though it can be modestly limited in time, place, and manner). On the other hand, it probably doesn’t violate the 1st Amendment to deny tax-exempt status to all groups whose primary purpose is to engage in political activity.

@Kay:
What terrifies the “job creators” is that they lose control. If one of the main things they use to keep working people from figuring out that they have a crappy job and can move because they won’t loose health care actually works they are done. Also they have to actually pay something for the people they screw over now in not providing any health care now.
In other words it’s about the money. They are whores who are addicted to money and will do anything for more. They are not rational, and trying to understand them in a rational way will not work.

“tea party” and such seem to me to be entirely appropriate red-flag words for inappropriate political activity by tax-exempt groups circa 2010-13. If critics of Obama from the left had owned the name “firebaggers” and created a bunch of nominally apolitical organizations to raise money, it would also be appropriate to red-flag that.

Agreed. But it does seem that the enforcement of 501(c)(4) is uneven, favoring large groups over small ones.

@Kay:
What terrifies the “job creators” is that they lose control. If one of the main things they use to keep working people from figuring out that they have a crappy job and can move because they won’t lo[]se health care actually works they are done.

I know of at least one instance where one of these clowns doesn’t seem to know how numbers work, and with the business he’s running he should be much wealthier than he is, but he’s too innumerate and blinded by his wingtard ideology to do anything about it.

The only thing you really need to know about numbers in business is making sure you have enough cash to pay expenses. A lot of business folks are “numbers” people, but they know how to make and sell the product or service their selling.

The Teapublicans hate Obamcare because they want poor people to die because they’re economic Darwinists. Any poor that gets any help with medical costs is one less poor that will die and when a poor person doesn’t die that makes Teapublicans “deserved” medical care seem less deserved and less special.

The only thing that’s worse to a Teapublican than a poor person living is when a brown person lives. Every brown person that doesn’t die from a completely preventable disease with health insurance is an attack on their freedom. You know, like how every gay marriage is an attack on their straight marriages.

And yes it’s a brown person. White poors are fine for them because that’s who vote them in and there aren’t enough riches to win the election without them.

And THAT is why it galls them so much that they actually NEED Latinos and African Americans to win the Presidency next time.

@Tonal (visible) Crow: That is probably the result of the large groups being able to afford better legal talent to draw up the documents in the first place and to defend the submissions when questioned. My guess is that the smaller groups aren’t being targeted per se, it’s just that they’re more likely to screw up the paperwork and be denied tax-exempt status.

The day AFTER Obama was elected, I began seeing idiots posting comments on the web such as “Worst president ever!” I cannot begin to express my own level of resentment and indignation over such idiocy

This.

I was mostly disgusted by the number of Well Thinking Very Serious “Moderates” and “Centrists” who’d given Bush six years’ worth of chances before beginning to concede that okay, now we may have a problem, but who suddenly decided, within one semester of Obama’s inauguration, that he was too extreme and not getting the job done and what he was going was not okay.

If nothing else, the Obama presidency’s been an object lesson for me in how the two parties are not treated equally in the media or in Official Washington opinion, and the Democrats most definitely have the short end of the stick. (Too young to remember much about Clinton).

What terrifies the “job creators”white people is that they lose control.

Job creators are just a subclass. The Tea Party is the proper representative body. Seriously, white people in this country are slowly losing their shit to a black president, gay marriage, mexican immigrants, poor people that get just a tiny bit more dignity every time a Democrat gets elected (very small praise for Democrats here) and so on. Increasing numbers are learning how to cope with this, but that only panics those being left behind even more as their numbers decrease, their solidarity has to grow. Unhinged is an inevitable state.

This. It’s my firm belief that it’s not the money they miss most about the Gilded Age, but the power and status that comes from being able to control the lives of all the little people. And it’s also why they don’t really care how much damage they do to the economy. If America spirals down into complete third-world-country status, but they get to be at the top, then as far as they’re concerned it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Decades ago I owned a manufacturing business that had to compete for highly skilled workers from a pool that wasn’t big enough. I paid high wages and health care for two reasons.
1. They earned it.
2. It was how I could get and keep good talent.
But then we lost a lot of our business to off shoring in our industry and the failure of the system to provide training for people to do skilled labor rather that just go to college and do what?
So now few small business provide health care insurance because it is way too expensive. And I’m saying that as someone who used to purchase health care insurance and had to spend way too much time dealing with it. Deciding which company had the best plan per dollar, trying to stay not only competitive but actually in business. The ACA will help greatly with that. I wish we had had something like that decades ago, my life would have been better, my employees lives would have been better, and we as a country may have been able to stay competitive in manufacturing, because we may not have gone down the wallyworld path of always the cheapest shit regardless of the quality.
The cost and disease of a lack of health care and the decisions that it spawned or allowed have damaged this country greatly.

What terrifies the “job creators” is that they lose control. If one of the main things they use to keep working people from figuring out that they have a crappy job and can move because they won’t loose health care actually works they are done

I don’t get this line of logic.

Most employers hate paying for health care, because not only is it an ever increasing cost of doing business, but especially for small businesses, you are very vulnerable to a catastrophic claiming completely screwing up your rates, i.e. businesses are incentivised to make sure they do not hire the elderly or people with chronic conditions.

Businesses would rejoice to no longer have to carry health insurance expenses on their books and not have to worry, if someone’s heart attack or cancer diagnosis would make them very hard to insure in the small to medium sized group markets or at least get them stuck with a doubling (at the least) of their insurance premiums.

In all honesty, the individual market isn’t going to be immediately a boon to people wanting options to group insurance, but over the course of a few years it may work out that way.

Right now the individual market is going to sop up the people, who need insurance but don’t have it or are under insured through their employers. This is going to cause individual premiums to be not very competitive compared to group premiums.

When the penalties for not taking insurance get high enough that the 20-somethings decide to get insurance, then you’ll see the individual market start to level off / drop with regards to premiums and maybe become a viable alternative to employer based coverage.

Also, too the provisions on Obamacare essentially double down on the employer provided insurance model rather than try to move to everyone having their own coverage. Employers get dinged, if people aren’t on their insurance, even if they have their own personal insurance, so employers have an incentive now to make sure people don’t get their own plans.

It is interesting that Noonan and others apparently feel they have to shift the focus from the political groups to individuals. They need a better narrative, I guess. A tactical shift. They wouldn’t be changing the story if they felt the story was resonating politically.

So they pick a victim with a name like VanderSloot? Good luck with that.

@👽 Martin:
How many of the “job creators” are in the tea party? None? Yeah I thought so. The “jc” are using the tea party to make noise.
Yes the tea party is old white people losing their shit for all the reasons you state, but you have it backwards. All the tea party has is noise. They get their money to operate from the rich who want them to make noise because it is convenient and useful and costs the rich very little.

Sorry, but bullshit. Government violates the 1st Amendment when it uses political affiliation to decide how to dispense benefits, even benefits that are “privileges” instead of “rights”, such as, say, driver’s licenses.

Oh really? So if a group applies to be tax exempt because their purpose is “social-welfare” and they’re really a political group you have no problem with that? Or is it only when you agree with the political group?

@gene108:Businesses would rejoice to no longer have to carry health insurance expenses on their books and not have to worry,

That certainly would be the logical thought process. It is mine and as I said I would have been one of those business people in the past. I’d have given my left nut for the ACA 30-40 years ago.
But you are expecting logical thought processes here and they are much rarer than you could possibly believe. Many small business people have bought into the conservative mind meld that all government is bad and will only screw them, never help. Never. Ever. So they see this as another power grab by the government and the evil insurance companies that will make them spend even more money and take away their little levers of power.
You can’t apply logic to stupidity.

@Ruckus:
I still have the HP14 (With RPN) that I used to do programming. In the early days of CNC I used the HP14 and Lotus 123 to point plot circular interpolation for the mills and radii for the lathes.

It’s not that they can’t fight. It’s that the Blue Dog Democrats are the only kind of Democrats that win election in red states. Therefore they won’t fight because they want to win elections more than they care about their party but they’re too “liberal” to be Republicans. But they vote with Democrats on certain issues.

Let’s not also forget who pays their bills. Unless they’re independently wealthy and need NO money from anyone else, all politicians are owned by special interests and who have the most money? Banks. Insurance Companies. Chemical Companies. Oil Companies. NRA. Not only is their vote bought and sold but during primary season and election season they can be outspent. If they won’t play ball, the special interests will find someone who will. And right now, the causes popular with Conservatives are the ones who have the real money. Michael Bloomberg is the only one with deep enough pockets with his anti-gun group and he STILL gets outspent by the NRA.

And this is ALL POLITICIANS. Every single fucking one. Democrat. Republican. Independent. Anyone.

You want to know when Dems will start fighting, pokeyblow? When causes that are popular with liberals have as deep pockets as the Conservatives causes.

@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
A little one upmanship then. When I started programing I used a slide rule and logarithms. We moved up to using a large desktop adding machine because that was better than the slide rule and trig calculators hadn’t been marketed yet.

I consider myself thoroughly one-upped. Although I never used it for programming I still have my log-log-trig slide rule. I take it out once a year and work with it for a few hours. I figure that at some point I’ll be one of a handful of people on the planet who can still use a slide rule.

@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
And now I’ve been one upped. I can’t remember the last time I even saw my slide rules. Yes I said rules as I seem to recall I owned 3 at one time. I also programed an accounting program on punch cards in fortran class in college. Aww, the shitty old days. The other day one of the younger folks at my part time machinist job(OK, that’s everyone else including the boss and I’ve got about 14 yrs on him) asked some question and I asked him if he knew what a slide rule was. He had no clue what I was talking about. And yet I’m the only one there with a trig calculator.

Um… to be fair, I don’t think you can use a calculation which “assumes that an individual’s chance of being audited was related to their income, but not to their political views” to prove that an individual’s chance of being audited was related to their income, but not to their political views.

Just to show how things work out, I now live in the town where one of the small shops I worked in is located. I ran into the owner’s son, now the owner, and introduced myself. After we chatted a while about the business in general and my work experience in particular he asked me if I’d be interested in working for him. He’s unable to find trained people and training the people he does hire is expensive and limited in effectiveness because they haven’t even a nodding familiarity with geometry, let alone trig. I thanked him for his interest and declined.

@Violet: It would be best if the story were about a fake celebirty committing a fake murder. Any new “scandals” that divert attention from these “scandals” need to be fake. Sort of like the football player’s fake romance with a fake girl. (Did we cross some kind of Pop Culture Rubicon with the media frenzy over that story?)

@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
A little part of my job is to help train people for the same reason. I’ve been doing training for such a long time and I have the patience for it. Thirty-fourty years ago we always had apprentices, to help and to get trained people. But there just are not enough shops with the long term outlook that training is absolutely necessary. Most just see the immediate costs of training but forget to factor in the long term costs of not training.
Wait isn’t that just another form of the short term, quarterly profits thinking that fucks us over continuously from all levels of business? I believe it is.

the Carter era federal government’s abolition of tax-exempt status for all white “Christian” academies in the Deep South was unconstitutional?

They received federal funds, as well as tax-exempt status, but were not compliant with the Civil Rights act, because they didn’t allow blacks to enroll.

I forget exactly what schools were involved (I think mostly Ivy League ones), but I think some universities got into issues with being denied federal funds, during the Bush & Co. years because they refused to allow the CIA to recruit on campus and/or the U.S. military, because of various problems with government policies, such as discrimination against gays in the military.

Getting federal funds/tax-exempt status requires compliance with various federal laws, which go beyond being just a social service organization and/or certain credos automatically get shot down in the application process, which is one reason I think the KKK isn’t a tax exempt non-profit, even if they did some volunteer work on occasion.

@low-tech cyclist: Nate is kind of doing a Bayesian filter here. Noonan is saying “this is so improbable it MUST be deliberate” and Nate is running the numbers and saying, no, no it ain’t.

At this point, Noonan’s argument collapses into special pleading unless she has evidence, which of course, she does not.

When somebody makes an extraordinary claim without prior probability, they’d better be bringing some evidence because otherwise, time to ignore and move on. Dumb theories are so oversupplied they trade on the pink sheets, over the counter.

…tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right (certainly when the organization in question has the means to pay taxes).

I have only looked shallowly into this; is it possible (or likely) that the goal for some subset of these groups was to profit from tax exempt status? Essential, form a “social welfare group” with a political name and theme for fund raising purposes. Get tax exempt status. Solicit donations from the gullible. Spend measurably less than half on politics. Spend the rest on … other things. Administrative overhead, like generous salaries, parties, vacation rentals, etc.
I know that this is commonly suspected. Is it true?

I am an Obama max donor (primary and campaign) in 2008 and 2012. And yet, in 2010 I got audited by the IRS. I believe it is because I am white and Obama is black. So Obama is the real racist.

I’m sure it wasnt because I had a massive increase in income (payout from one job I had been at for more than a decade), I live overseas or I had filled out my taxes wrong from the previous years. No that could definitely not be it at all. I’m sure it was a reverse racist thing. Hence Obama = real racist.